06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (21 page)

James was thrilled.

“You won’t be sorry,” he assured her. “We’ll be a family, just like you’ve always wanted.”

At one time or another, we all make some sort of compromise. We convince ourselves to continue in jobs we’re weary of, socialize with people we abhor, maintain relationships that no longer thrill us, or stay locked in marriage to a spouse whose touch chills as cold as a scarecrow in winter. Linda had not grown up believing she deserved much from life. Remaining, at least temporarily, with James was a bargain she felt she could make. Yet coming to a decision and living with its consequences are two very different propositions.

In early August, James and Linda Bergstrom moved into the River’s Inn Country Villas in Manvel, Texas, not far from Pearland. It was a single street of wood-sided mobile homes painted pale yellow with blue trim, tucked among ranches where snow white egrets on stilt-thin legs trailed bulky grazing cattle. At the driveway’s end, the owners lived in their own double-wide trailer.

It was a bucolic setting, peaceful and calm. Connie and Bob Wittstruck had bought it hoping to found a colony where students would live in the trailers and take lessons from Connie, an artist. It was one of those schemes that fail to materialize. Instead their first tenants became James and Linda.

On the surface, the Bergstroms, of course, appeared no different from any young couple awaiting the birth of their first child. James was freshly out of the navy with his honorable discharge in hand. Their furniture arrived from Wash
ington and they settled into the tiny trailer. James drove off to work each afternoon to start the night shift at Devoe. Linda stayed home to care for the household. Yet before long, angry, violent arguments spilled out from unit three into the parking lot, and it became apparent to the Wittstrucks that the young couple was deeply troubled. Still there was no hint of how deep the trouble ran, or the drama slowly unfolding behind closed doors.

“I thought about what my mother had said. If James was willing to go for therapy, I was willing to give it a try,” said Linda later. “If he didn’t go for counseling, it was pointless. But somehow I needed to stop him from hurting anyone else. I had another plan. I wanted to know what had happened in Kitsap County, everything there was to know about the rape. Things I couldn’t have known unless he did it and told me. Because if he wasn’t going to get better, I was going to make sure he was caught.”

It was a dangerous game Linda played. Each day she prodded James. First she pushed him to go to counseling. As he had in Washington when she’d insisted he register the gun, James agreed but never followed through. Linda tried to maintain calm, fearing that the continual turmoil she was under might harm the baby. But it was no use; they fought constantly. Once he pulled a knife from the kitchen counter and chased her. Another time, he kicked a hole in the bathroom door when she locked herself inside to escape him. After one such argument, the Wittstrucks saw James pursuing Linda as she pulled out of the parking lot in her car. He held on to the door and ran beside her until she gunned the engine and pulled out onto the street.

No matter how she argued and reminded him of his promise to seek treatment, he was intransigent. He would not go to any doctor to discuss what he continued to refer to as “my problem.”

“I can’t go for counseling, Linda. They’ll turn me in,” he insisted each time she brought up his promise.

“Doctors don’t do that,” she scoffed.

“How stupid do you think I am?” he jeered. “That confidentiality bullshit is all talk. They’ll tell.”

The months ticked by: August, then September. Linda watched the talk shows every time they discussed rape. She wanted to know everything she could about rapists. How they thought, why they did it. She even called the “Geraldo” show one afternoon in New York and talked to an associate producer, begging him to do a segment on treatment for rapists. On “Oprah” she saw a child molester and couldn’t help considering how James had molested a young girl. The man on TV had also began victimizing others at an early age.

“What happens if you get out of prison?” Oprah asked the man. “Are you going to do it again?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I will.”

What Linda heard over and over was how difficult it was to rehabilitate sexual predators. How so few rapists and pedophiles respond to treatment. “It seemed more and more hopeless,” she said later.

Still, she had to take action. With no one else to rely on, she began monitoring James herself. One day she drove the distance from Manvel to Devoe and jotted down the time, calculating precisely when James should arrive home from work. Each night she waited, anxiously watching the clock, to hear the car driving on the gravel road to the trailer. Until James was home, she couldn’t relax. When he walked inside, she felt the rest of the world was safe. At least she knew on this particular night James Bergstrom wasn’t hurting anyone. But there were nights when James was late. Alone in the dark, Linda would peer out the curtains, desperately waiting to see his headlights turn off the road.

“I know how long it takes you to drive home,” Linda demanded when he showed up. “Where have you been?”

James always had an excuse. He had to jump a co-worker’s car or give someone a ride home. “Why don’t you just time me?” he finally suggested. “Write it down, since you’re constantly checking on me, anyway.”

Linda did. She began a calendar, recording the time he left the apartment for work each afternoon and what time he returned, allowing thirty minutes for the drive to and from Devoe. She insisted he call every evening during his dinner break to be sure he hadn’t left the plant. “If he wasn’t getting therapy, I was going to watch him,” she said later. “I wanted to know what he was doing. I didn’t want him to hurt anyone else.”

Rather than resist, James relished the attention Linda gave him. In his twisted logic, he viewed it as proof that she still loved him. “We can lick this together,” he crowed one afternoon when she wrote down the time he left the house. “You stick with me and we’ll do it.”

He was less amenable when she pumped him for information, anything she could find out about what had happened in Washington State. “I figured eventually he was either going to get so sick and tired of me asking, he’d tell me, or he’d kill me,” Linda explained later.

“Why do you want to know?” James would shout at her at such times. “What does it matter?”

“It matters,” Linda insisted. “If I’m going to help you, I need to know. You need to be open with me, if I’m going to stay.”

James held back, stone-silent, until one Sunday afternoon when he finally asked, “If I tell you what happened, will you get off my back?”

“Yes,” Linda replied. “I need to know. That way, maybe I can get over it.”

That afternoon, according to Linda, James told her about Washington State. How it had all started when he accosted women in malls, trying to strike up conversations that would lead to sex. Then he progressed to peeping in windows at the Silverdale Apartments, but that, too, soon failed to satisfy the overwhelming compulsions that drove him. Finally, he said, he’d entered a house through an open window. The woman was asleep in a chair, the television buzzing in the background.

“She was maybe forty,” he said, haltingly. “She looked at me and I knew she was still asleep. She probably thought I was part of a dream. I left. She was too old.”

James then recounted another house, this one occupied by a young wife and her child. He’d been watching the woman for a long time and felt attracted to her. He knew her schedule and what time she’d be home alone. That morning, he waited until her husband left for work and then slipped in through an unlocked garage door. She was in bed.

“She screamed,” he said. “I tied her up and told her to be quiet. That if she cooperated, I wouldn’t hurt her.”

But the woman fought so uncontrollably, he finally left, running from the house fearing she’d awakened the neighborhood and that police would soon be trailing him.

There were no flashing lights or sirens, no police banging on their door, and the next day James entered again, this time a trailer home off Old Military Road. Inside, a woman applied makeup in the bathroom mirror.

“I had your belt from your white terry cloth robe,” James said. “I figured I’d tie her up with it.”

Linda felt squeamish remembering how she had looked for that very belt, never dreaming James might have it or what he was doing with it.

“The woman freaked out and I couldn’t shut her up,” James continued. “I got scared and left.”

Then he’d bought the gun.

In a quiet, somber voice, James turned his attention to the actual rape.

“I just picked the house out at random,” he said. “I came in through the kitchen window. It was unlocked. The woman inside was about thirty, maybe five foot six inches and a hundred thirty pounds. She was asleep. When she heard me and woke up, I showed her the gun. She said, “How’d you get in?” but I told her not to talk, that if she cooperated, she wouldn’t get hurt. I tied up her hands and legs on the water bed. She said her husband was working at PSNS and that he’d be home soon. When I was done, I left out the window.”

James didn’t cry or say he was sorry. Instead he looked down at his hands, as ashamed as a small boy confessing to shoplifting a candy bar from the neighborhood grocery store.

“What kind of person does something like this, James?” she asked. “What drives you?”

“I’ve got a problem,” he said almost casually. “But I’ve only done it a few times. I can learn to control it. You’re pregnant and we’re going to be a family. I’ll never do it again. I’d never risk my family that way. Is knowing all of this going to help you? Can we forget it now?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s going to help me and the baby.”

“From that moment on, I had a clear goal,” Linda said later. “I didn’t even think about the possibility of changing him. I wanted him caught.”

The following Monday afternoon, James left for work as usual, and Linda pulled out the phone numbers she’d kept from Kitsap County. She dialed and a detective answered. Quickly she explained who she was and recited her husband’s case number, K89053185. Then she told him everything James had told her the previous weekend, all about the homes he had admitted entering and the night of the rape.

“Now, I couldn’t know she had a water bed or what she looked like unless he told me and he did it,” Linda said excitedly. “I want to testify against him. I want to help you put him away.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

“The thing is, Mrs. Bergstrom, you can’t testify against him. The law doesn’t allow it,” the detective said finally. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but one spouse can’t testify against the other. There are laws against it.”

Linda thought her heart would stop, lodged as it was in her throat. This was impossible.

“What am I going to do?” she said.

“You’re going to have to wait,” the Washington detective said glumly. “Wait until he messes up again. These guys always do.”

Linda thanked the officer and hung up. She had never felt so alone. Then, just to know she’d done all she could, she dialed the dispatch number for the Houston Police Department. When the operator answered, she told him everything about James, who he was, where he lived, where he worked, what he looked like, the license number of the car, and what had happened in Washington State.

“He could be out raping women,” Linda said.

“Who is this?” the dispatcher asked.

“I can’t tell you,” Linda explained. “I’m afraid of him. If he knew I’d called, he’d kill me.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye out for him,” the dispatcher said before hanging up.

Then Linda sat back and waited. Waited for something to happen. Waited for the police to knock on the door. Waited for James to come home and say he was being investigated.

She waited, but no one came.

As the days dragged on, Linda grew increasingly despondent. It was obvious no one cared. The navy had done nothing. Washington State couldn’t prosecute.
God, if I only knew what Chris did with that gun,
she thought. And apparently, Houston police were ignoring her call as well.

Perhaps the worst toll came from the charade of living together as husband and wife. She hated being in any family or social situations, even taking the step of calling her mother, brothers, and sisters, and pleading with them all not to invite her and James anywhere as a couple. “I just couldn’t stand pretending,” she said later. “It made me want to scream.”

Though her family, for the most part, agreed, James’s family was another matter. Thanksgiving came and he insisted they have dinner at his parents’. Linda fumed. She dreaded going to the Bergstroms’, even walking into the house knowing what had gone on there for so many years. More and more she blamed them. If they had told her about
James, she never would have married him. It was a house with too many secrets.

When she told James how she felt, he came at her with his fist. Linda arrived at the Bergstroms’ that Thanksgiving with an angry black eye rimmed in red, her body covered with bruises. James sat next to her bristling with enthusiasm, acting every inch the devoted son and family man, as Linda ate sullenly beside him, her face stinging from the beating he’d administered. No one even mentioned Linda’s injuries or asked how she’d been hurt. She assumed they realized James had beaten her and didn’t care.

In fact, James was becoming progressively more violent. She wondered sometimes if it was because in Washington he’d still had something to hide. Now that she knew everything, there was nothing to conceal, not even his fury. The most trivial things could set him off. Once when she was outside washing her car, James bellowed out the window that he wanted her inside, on the couch, watching television with him. She ignored him, until he came outside and kicked the new car’s fender, denting it.

“See what you make me do?” James charged, incredulously. “Are you satisfied, you bitch? You can’t pay attention to me. Keep paying attention to your new fucking car.”

Yet no injustice approached the revulsion she felt every time James touched her. If she shunned him for more than a day or two, he became violent, throwing food around the room or breaking whatever was handy. Eventually she would give in, staring at the corner of the room, thinking about whatever else she could muster while he satiated his appetite. He never seemed to realize or care how far away her spirit was. Of course, James had never liked it when she participated. From the beginning he’d turned off if she moaned or writhed beneath him. He clearly had no need for anything beyond her body.